The iterative development of the Internet and digital technology is like a war drum urging the public to demonstrate the possibility, richness, challenge, and speculation of Internet literature and art again and again. It also brings us a core question: Internet literature and art are a spiritual way for people to grasp the world. How should we recognize and grasp it? The author tries to make a superficial discussion from the perspective of artistic language.
Any art has its own special artistic language. Art is not only the physical presentation of aesthetics, but also the mediated presentation of artistic language. Literature, music, art, and dance are all the same. So, does online literature and art have its own unique artistic language? If not now, will it happen in the future?
It seems a bit premature to raise this issue now. Its premise is to assume that Internet literature and art has become an independent art category, but in fact, at present, both Internet literature and Internet audio-visuals are only "a rich totality" composed of various innovative types relying on the Internet as a medium, and their independence has not yet been fully, significantly, and clearly demonstrated.
However, according to McLuhan's theory, from print media to electronic media, and then to digital media, changes in the media environment and ecology have a profound impact on the renewal of aesthetic experience. The aesthetic methods and aesthetic activity characteristics formed by Internet thinking have increasingly appeared in various innovative types of online literature and art. Online movies are watched in slices, online dramas are watched at double speed, short videos are disseminated socially, and the reading experience of online literature is also very different from traditional reading. These increasingly normalized, universal, and popular phenomena make us feel that whether there is inherent uniqueness in the artistic language of online literature and art seems worthy of our serious consideration and objective answer.
The first thing that needs to be seen is that the development and evolution of artistic forms are deeply and closely connected with the underlying logic of the media. Media is an extension of human senses. In traditional art, the mediated presentation of its artistic language also manifests itself as the concentrated strengthening of certain human sensory functions in aesthetic experience. For example, music and radio drama are to the auditory sense, calligraphy and art are to the visual sense. Among traditional arts, stage is a relatively "comprehensive" art category, which includes literature, rap, instrumental music, performance and many other artistic elements to varying degrees. However, its comprehensiveness is limited to the time and space of the aesthetic scene and does not have the extended function of media. Only after entering the era of electronic media did "comprehensive art" break through the limitations of time and space. New comprehensive arts such as film and television also created a new artistic language after realizing the extension of media.
Digital media is a new iteration compared to electronic media. The Internet is not only the communication medium for all types of online literature and art, but Bit is also the physical medium for all types of online literature and art. In the world of bits, the extension of the Internet media to people's senses is no longer singular, but comprehensive, three-dimensional, and integrated. Artificial intelligence is regarded as an extension of the human nervous system. This kind of media extension integrates the real world and the virtual world and creates comprehensive interaction. It is a two-dimensional media immersion, rather than the one-dimensional media immersion of the virtual world created by movies and TV. Therefore, the degree of "comprehensiveness" and expression of online literature and art in art, compared with the comprehensive art produced in the era of electronic media such as traditional film and television, have completely new characteristics, occupy a new level of magnitude, and are showing increasingly clear aesthetic differences.
"Comprehensive art" will gradually shape its own unique artistic language as it matures, and will eventually be familiar and accepted by the public. For example, the artistic language of traditional opera is often unified by "program" in the industry. The artistic language of movies and TV is often referred to as "shot" or "montage". Can online literature and art become a new type of "comprehensive art"? In recent years, many experts and scholars have begun to discuss its aesthetic characteristics and artistic language issues. Based on the underlying logic of Internet media, they have successively proposed a series of discourse concepts such as "interactive immersion", "scene" and even "body" as the possibility of naming the aesthetic language of Internet literature and art. Of course, this discussion still needs to wait for the next development and practice of online literature and art to gradually become clear.
What also needs to be noted is that different media have different epistemological biases. Even if the stories of novels and movies are the same, they still convey to people two completely different artistic "reality" and aesthetic experiences. In his famous theory of media evolution, Levinson regarded the Internet media as a new technological stage that "reshapes reality." The Internet has re-corrected the sensory bias strengthened by previous media technologies and the "partial reality" lost thereby. While breaking the limitations of human physiology and realizing the extension of media, it has returned to the "complete reality" of full sensory experience. The accelerated application of virtual reality technology and artificial intelligence has brought us an extremely intuitive experience.
Today, in the process of imitating and copying people's perception and cognitive models, technology has moved from "mediatization" to "de-mediation", that is, the progress of media technology has reached a level where people cannot feel the existence of media. This will inevitably have a subtle impact on the development of artistic forms. For example, spoken language is the earliest medium born by human beings. Folk storytelling, rap and other arts that rely on spoken language have a strong on-the-spot nature in their initial stages. After the advancement of media caused oral expression to be replaced by written expression, sensory bias led to changes in aesthetic patterns. The reason why a large number of colloquial expressions have reappeared in online literature is not only because of the non-professional nature of the authors. The deeper reason may also be that the "de-mediation" of the Internet has brought people back to the "live" aesthetic experience mode.
Of course, the most typical manifestation of "de-mediation" at the moment is the superimposed application field of virtual reality technology and artificial intelligence. Corresponding to online literature and art, this field will bring new, full-sensory experience, more perceptual and intuitive aesthetic objects, as well as the expansion of the boundaries of artistic creativity under the model of human-machine co-creation and integration. The coexistence of virtual reality and real reality, and the continued evolution of the cooperation between artificial intelligence and humans, will further enhance the "comprehensive" and "de-mediation" characteristics of online literature and art, thus profoundly affecting the development trend of its artistic language.
The Marxist view of literature and art believes that literature and art are people’s grasp of the “artistic spirit” of the world, an intuitive and perceptual grasp. "De-mediation" provides more convenient conditions for this kind of intuitive and perceptual life experience, but in the final analysis, the "humanization" of media is still a higher stage of technology in the field of online literature and art to create people's aesthetic consciousness and accumulate aesthetic experience. Only people can master the world in a spiritual and aesthetic way, and only people. Therefore, the development of the artistic language of online literature and art is still based on the laws of human aesthetic spiritual activities and further deepens the aesthetic relationship between people and the world. It’s worth waiting and watching what kind of new “language” it will produce in the future.
(The author is a doctoral candidate in Media Arts at Communication University of China and deputy director of the Internet Literature and Art Communication Center of China Federation of Literary and Art Circles)
